The present invention relates to intelligent routing of data over networked communication systems, and more specifically to intelligent routing of Internet networks.
The Internet is increasingly being used as a method of transport for communication between companies and consumers. Performance bottlenecks have emerged over time, limiting the usefulness of the Internet infrastructure for business critical applications. These bottlenecks occur at distinct places along the network paths. Each distinct bottleneck demands a custom solution.
The “last mile” bottleneck has received the most attention over the past few years and can be defined as bandwidth which connects end users to the Internet. Solutions such as xDSL and Cable Internet access have emerged to dramatically improve last mile performance. The “first mile” bottleneck is the network segment where content is hosted on Web servers. First mile access has improved through the use of more powerful Web servers, higher speed communications channels between servers and storage, and load balancing techniques.
The “middle mile,” however, is the last bottleneck to be addressed in the area of Internet routing and the most problematic under conventional approaches to resolving such bottlenecks. The “middle mile,” or core of the Internet, is composed of large backbone networks and “peering points” where these networks are joined together. Peering points have traditionally been congested and under-built structurally, and there is generally no incentive for existing backbone network providers to cooperate to alleviate the congestion that exists. Given that over 90% of all Internet traffic passes through multiple networks, just increasing core bandwidth and introducing optical peering will not provide adequate solutions to these problems.
Peering is when two Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”) connect in a settlement-free manner and exchange routes between their subsystems. For example, if ISP1 peers with ISP2 then ISP1 will advertise only routes reachable within ISP1 to ISP2 and vice versa. This differs from transit connections where fall Internet routing tables are exchanged. An additional difference is that transit connections are generally paid connections while peering points are generally settlement-free, that is each side pays for the circuit costs to the peering point but not beyond. There is an additional concept of paid-peering which is a hybrid of the two scenarios. A subset of the routing table is sent, yet a “not change” is incurred for traffic sent into the paid peering point.
Routes received through peering points are one Autonomous System (“AS”) away from a BGP perspective. That makes them highly preferred by the protocol (and by the provider as well since those connections are cost free). However, when there are capacity problems at a peering point and performance through it suffers, BGP will still prefer the peering point and the end to end performance of all data traffic will suffer.
Since the peering points are settlement-free, there is no Service Level Agreement (“SLA”) offered across such peering points. Since neither party pays the other for access or service, the remedial action in the case of poor peering point performance is generally a long wait for the downstream provider to improve capacity at that point. Structurally, the Internet and its peering points include a series of interconnected service providers. These network service providers maintain a service level within their autonomous system (AS) but provide no service level outside of that system. Thus, the Internet path from end to end is generally unmanaged with a “best effort” service level, making the Internet unreliable as a data transport mechanism.
Conventionally, several network providers attempt to improve the general unreliability of the Internet by using a “Private-NAP” service connecting major service providers. This solution, however, is incapable of maintaining service level commitments outside or downstream of those providers. In addition the common technological approach in use to select an optimal path is susceptible to multipath (e.g., ECMP) in downstream providers. The conventional technology thus cannot detect or avoid problems in real time, or near real time.
Additionally, the conventional network technology operates on only egress traffic. The ingress point of the network is difficult to control. These shortcomings prevent any kind of service level assurance across multiple providers, or end to end on the Internet.
In some common approaches, it is possible to determine in real time the service level being offered by a particular network service provider. This technology includes two types. First is near real time active calibration of the data path, using tools such as ICMP, traceroute, Sting, and vendors such as CQOS, Inc., and Keynote, Inc. Another traditional approach is real time passive analysis of the traffic being sent and received, utilizing such tools as TCPdump, and vendors such as Network Associates, Inc., Narus, Inc., Brix, Inc., and P-cube, Inc.
These conventional technological approaches, however, only determine whether a service level agreement (SLA) is being violated. An exemplary SLA is an agreement between a network service provider and a customer that specifies, usually in measurable terms, what service the network service provider will furnish. None of the approaches to Internet routing offer control or visibility into the network beyond the point of analysis. Although such service level analysis is a necessary part of service level assurance, alone it is insufficient to guarantee SLA performance. Thus, the common approaches fail to both detect and to optimally avoid Internet problems such as chronic web site outages, poor download speeds, jittery video, and fuzzy audio.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and a method to overcome the above described shortcomings of the conventional approach to network service level management. Accordingly, there is a need to provide Internet users with optimized paths such that guaranteed SLAs across multiple networks (on-net and off-net) are possible.